The effects of sex, age, and interval duration on the perception of time

The present experiment examined the interactive effects of sex, age, and interval duration on individual’s time perception accuracy. Participants engaged in the duration production task and subsequently completed questionnaires designed to elicit their temporal attitudes. The overall group of 100 individuals was divided evenly between the sexes. Five groups, each composed of 10 males and 10 females, were divided by decades of age ranging from 20 to 69 years old. The specific time estimation task was an empty interval production procedure composed of 50 trials on each of four different intervals of 1, 3, 7, and 20 s, respectively. The presentation orders of these intervals were randomized across participants but yoked across the sexes within each of the respective age groups. Analysis of the production results indicated significant influences for the sex of the participant while age did not appear to affect estimates of these short durations. Temporal attitudes, as reflected in responses to time questionnaire inquiries, did however exhibit significant differences across age. The contending theoretical accounts of such sex and age differences are considered and explanatory accounts that present a synthesis of endogenous and exogenous causal factors are discussed in light of the present pattern of findings.     

How cognitive load affects duration judgments: A meta-analytic review

A meta-analysis of 117 experiments evaluated the effects of cognitive load on duration judgments. Cognitive load refers to information-processing (attentional or working-memory) demands. Six types of cognitive load were analyzed to resolve ongoing controversies and to test current duration judgment theories. Duration judgments depend on whether or not participants are informed in advance that they are needed: prospective paradigm (informed) versus retrospective paradigm (not informed). With higher cognitive load, the prospective duration judgment ratio (subjective duration to objective duration) decreases but the retrospective ratio increases. Thus, the duration judgment ratio differs depending on the paradigm and the specific type of cognitive load. As assessed by the coefficient of variation, relative variability of prospective, but not retrospective, judgments increases with cognitive load. The prospective findings support models emphasizing attentional resources, especially executive control. The retrospective findings support models emphasizing memory changes. Alternative theories do not fit with the meta-analytic findings and are rejected.     

Cross-modal congruency benefits for combined tactile and visual signaling

This series of experiments tested the assimilation and efficacy of tactile messages that were created based on five common military arm and hand signals. We compared the response times and accuracy rates for these tactile representations against responses to equivalent visual representations of the same messages. Experimentally, such messages were displayed in either tactile or visual forms alone, or using both modalities in combination. There was a performance benefit for concurrent message presentations, which showed superior response times and improved accuracy rates when compared with individual presentations in either modality alone. Such improvement was due largely to a reduction in premotor response time. These improvements occurred equally in military and nonmilitary samples. Potential reasons for this multimodal facilitation are discussed. On a practical level, these results confirm the utility of tactile messaging to augment visual messaging, especially in challenging and stressful environments where visual messaging is not feasible or effective.     

Implicit and explicit prejudice in the 2008 American presidential election

The 2008 US presidential election was an unprecedented opportunity to study the role of racial prejudice in political decision making. Although explicitly expressed prejudice has declined dramatically during the last four decades, more subtle implicit forms of prejudice (which come to mind automatically and may influence behavior unintentionally) may still exist. In three surveys of representative samples of American adults, explicit and implicit prejudice were measured during the months preceding the election. Both explicit and implicit prejudice were significant predictors of later vote choice. Citizens higher in explicit prejudice were less likely to vote for Barack Obama and more likely to vote for John McCain. After controlling for explicit prejudice, citizens higher in implicit prejudice were less likely to vote for Obama, but were not more likely to vote for McCain. Instead, they were more likely to either abstain or to vote for a third-party candidate rather than Obama. The results suggest that racial prejudice may continue to influence the voting process even among people who would not endorse these attitudes.     

Regret and the negative evaluation of decision outcomes in major depression

Disruption of normal emotional experience is central to the phenomenology of depression. Twenty-three depressed outpatients and 23 control subjects performed a computerized decision-making task, during which affective ratings were assessed online to identify various dimensions of emotional experience. We sought to contrast regret (the comparison of the outcomes of selected and nonselected options) with the general negative appraisal of task events. The experience of regret was reduced in depressed patients, an effect that was particularly related to self-reported apathy scores. In an exploratory analysis, we observed that females had a general downward shift in their ratings, as compared with males, but disappointment and regret effects were of similar magnitude. The possible contribution of the orbitofrontal cortex to the phenomenology of regret is discussed. Supplemental materials for this article may be downloaded from http://cabn.psychonomic-journals.org/content/ supplemental.     

Investigating the Role of Goal Orientation in Job Seekers’ Experience of Value Congruence

There is still limited understanding of how goal orientations influence the association between value congruence (VC) and organisational attraction for job seekers. We address this issue by investigating the impact of individuals’ goal orientations on the VC–attraction relationship. Our investigation using different measurement approaches to congruence across two studies also allowed us to examine the implications of different methods to operationalising VC in job search contexts. Two prominent types of goal orientation in job search—learning-approach goal orientation (LAGO) and performance-avoid goal orientation (PAGO)—were hypothesised to moderate the relationship between VC and organisational attraction. In study 1, value congruence based on direct molar perceptions displayed a stronger positive relationship with attraction among low LAGO individuals. Study 2, using separate atomistic judgments of person and organisational values, also demonstrated that LAGO moderates the effects of VC on attraction. However, the form of moderation effects varied across different types of work values (i.e., relationships and security). These findings demonstrate the need to contextualise the study of job seekers’ VC within a goal-striving context, where different ways of operationalising VC can also shed more light on the psychological processes underlying judgments of congruence.     

Atypically heterogeneous vertical first fixations to faces in a case series of people with developmental prosopagnosia

ABSTRACT

When people recognize faces, they normally move their eyes so that their first fixation is in the optimal location for efficient perceptual processing. This location is found just below the centre-point between the eyes. This type of attentional bias could be partly innate, but also an inevitable developmental process that aids our ability to recognize faces. We investigated whether a group of people with developmental prosopagnosia would also demonstrate neurotypical first fixation locations when recognizing faces during an eye-tracking task. We found evidence that adults with prosopagnosia had atypically heterogeneous first fixations in comparison to controls. However, differences were limited to the vertical, but not horizontal, plane of the face. We interpret these findings by suggesting that subtle changes to face-based eye movement patterns in developmental prosopagnosia may underpin their face recognition impairments, and suggest future work is still needed to address this possibility.